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Levi does not present this as a matter of altru- ism. He treats it as a test of enterprise, and thus he keeps sentimentality and self-congramlation at ba But enterprise is enough. On the night Levi and his French friends brought back the stove and the potatoes, one of theirward-mates- To- warowski, a typhus patient-proposed that each man give a portion of his food to those who had gone on this mission. "Only a day before, a similar event would have been inconceivable," Levi writes. "The law of the Lager [camp] said: 'eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.' "T owarowski' s proposal, and the ward's agreement, "meant that the Lagerwas dead." That night: -.. Arthur and I sat smoking cigarettes made of herbs found in the kitchen, and spoke of many things, both past and future. In the middle of this endless plain, frozen and full of war, in the small dark room swarming with germs, we felt at peace with ourselves and with the world. We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something useful-perhaps like God after the first day of creation. Eight days later comes the liberation. A man in the ward has died (they lost only one), and Levi and Charles have gone out into the snow to deposit his body in the common grave. But the grave is full, "overflowing with discol- ored limbs." As they are standing there, wondering what to do, they look up and see four Russian soldiers, "with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats," coming down the road on horse- back. "When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words. . . . They did not greet us, nor did they smile." To Levi and Charles, the sight of men in a state of advanced starvation-not to speak of a ditch full of skeletal corpses-was com- mon, but to these young Russians it was not. On their faces, Levi writes, he saw shame, the shame "that the just man experiences at another man's crime." Horribly, Levi and Charles were also ashamed, filled "with a painful sense of pudency . . . and also with anguish, be- cause we felt. . . that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to b " ru out our past. When Levi got back to Turin, he fell in love, married, and went to work as an industrial chemist, a profession that he pursued full time for almost thirty years. (His first six books were written at night and on weekends.) He had already de- cided in the camp that if he lived he would write a book about the experience. Within a month of his return, he began "Survival in Auschwitz," and he finished it in just over a year. When it was first published, in 1947, it sold only about fif- teen hundred copies. At that time, no one wanted to hear about the camps. But when the book was revised and reissued, in 1958, it was a runaway success. Heartened, Levi embarked on a se- quel, "The Reawakening," which de- scribes his journey home from the camp. Like "Survival in Auschwitz," "The Reawakening" is not just a memoir-it is a moral tale, in this case the story of Levi's remarriage to life-and, in con- trast to the tight-lipped "Survival in Auschwitz," it is loose and ga Levi later said that by the time he wrote down these stories, more than a decade after the events, he had told them many times. Hence the book's picaresque qual- ity-it is a string of anecdotes-and also, at times, a certain patness in the comedy. This is shtick, well polished. (And that's just fine. We want him to have this pleasure, of telling his favorite joke.) The guiding spirits of the book are the Russians, his liberators, a people, in Levi's view, as decent and disorganized as the Germans were criminal and effi- cient. Between their endemic chaos and the fact that, for much of this time, there was still a war on, it took the Russians seven months to get Levi pointed south- west rather than northeast of Ausch- witz-he had a leisurely stroll through Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, and Hungary-but they fed the ex-prisoners well when they cOlÙd, and gave every- one (babies included) ten ounces of to- bacco a month, and put on variety shows, with singing and dancing, in the hold- Ing camps. " S urvival in Auschwitz" and "The Reawakening" established Levi as a writer, but a certain kind of writer: a sur- vivor, a witness. He wanted to serve as a witness and desired it all the more ur- gently as, in the seventies, neo- Fascism and Holocaust denial reared their heads. He spoke to endless numbers of school